Fulsome on stage, frozen at home

Shakespeare for My Father

By John Gross

12:00AM GMT 23 Nov 1996

Shakespeare for My Father

Think No Evil of Us

Scrooge Oliver!

Martin Guerre

A FEW years ago Lynn Redgrave was invited to prepare an evening of amusing family anecdotes for an audience in Washington DC. She agreed, and it proved the starting point for something very different, and more interesting - Shakespeare for My Father, a one-woman show which she has frequently performed in America, and which can now be seen at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

There are still lots of amusing anecdotes - though they are mainly about other actors, from Edith Evans to Richard Burton, rather than the Redgrave family - and they enable Miss Redgrave to display her considerable gifts as a mimic. At the heart of the show, however, is a seriousness and highly-charged account of her relationship with her father.

It is primarily a story of emotional neglect. Michael Redgrave, a masterful portrayer of emotion on stage, clearly found it difficult to express affection at home - at any rate to his youngest child. Repeated instances of remoteness were summed up for Lynn by her discovery that his copious diaries didn't contain even a passing reference to the fact of her birth. It was only in disease-afflicted old age that he seems to have been able to display the love which she craved.

We are dealing with tricky material here. Wrongly handled, it could easily have resulted in an embarrassing emotional striptease, or perhaps a parade of raw resentments. But Miss Redgrave's touch is sure: what she presents us with is moving and ultimately even heartening.

For a start, the show has no taint of "Daddy Dearest". Miss Redgrave isn't in the business of revenge, but of regret and reconciliation. We are reminded, for instance, that Michael Redgrave also had an absent father. A truly absent father, who died somewhere in Australia. He didn't even know where he was buried: it was left to Lynn (and it was a momentous event for her) to find out.

There are lots of things about her father, including his complicated sex life, which she doesn't tell us, but they are no part of her purpose. The show is far more a portrait of Lynn growing up than a portrait of Michael. And here too she avoids the potential dangers, above all with the saving salt of humour. Some of her most entertaining impersonations are those of her gauche younger self.

Finally, to set the crown on a notable evening, she has found a vehicle for her deeper feelings by repeatedly slipping into passages from Shakespeare, taking off from her childhood belief that she could get through to her father if only she understood the roles he played. The device is handled with skill, and she speaks the lines beautifully - like her father's daughter, you might say.

THINK No Evil of Us . . ., at the King's Head, Islington, is another one-man (or one-person) show with a difference. As a schoolboy, David Benson became obsessed with the late Kenneth Williams, after Williams had read out a story that Benson had written which won a prize on Jackanory, and at first you think you are going to get a straightforward tribute. He begins with a brilliant impersonation of Williams reciting Lewis Carroll's poem Hiawatha's Photographing, but then gradually shifts from evoking or mimicking the actor to talking about himself.

Williams is never far away, however, whether Benson is recalling (fairly obliquely) his gradual teenage acceptance of his own homosexuality, or (very directly) the ordeal of having a mother who went mad. The show is an experiment - a highly successful one - in blending biography and autobiography, and in the end we circle back to the actor, with an evocation, both funny and horrible, of a dinner party just before he took his life. It makes a riveting climax, though there is also a compassionate postscript.

There are no pantomimes or Christmas plays in the West End this year, so in principle Leslie Bricusse's musical Scrooge, at the Dominion Theatre, ought to be especially welcome. Alas, it turns out to be a cracker with a very small bang.

Based on a film which Bricusse wrote for an American company in the Seventies, it is competent, uninspired and bland. The liberties it takes with Dickens's plot can be forgiven, but the liberties it takes with his spirit are damnable. Passion and outrage don't come into the picture; and without them, the change of heart and the happy ending seem merely inane.

Anthony Newley plays Scrooge himself as a lovable old grouch, in a manner which might be quite endearing if that was what the part called for. There are some passable magic illusions and vanishing tricks, contrived by Paul Kieve. Nothing can make up, though, for the lack of real feeling. I never thought I'd see a version of A Christmas Carol in which Tiny Tim left me completely dry-eyed; but there's always a first time.

A second visit to Oliver!, at the London Palladium, proved all the more exhilarating by contrast. No, it's not Dickens either; but it borrows some of his energy and attack, and on its own terms it is highly satisfying piece of work. Nearly two years after it opened, Sam Mendes's production remains remarkably fresh, and it now has a powerful new asset in the shape of Robert Lindsay as Fagin. Lindsay gives a much more full-blooded performance than the production's original Fagin, Jonathan Pryce. He is funnier; his interpretation - unlike Pryce's, but in line with the music Lionel Bart wrote for the part - has an unmistakable Jewish tinge (stage-Jewish, of course); and there's an odd touch of ruined majesty about him. He flashes his eyes splendidly.

The much-publicised surgery performed on Martin Guerre, at the Prince Edward Theatre, has certainly had an effect. It is now a tighter, brighter, more coherent show than it was before, and the changes seem to have had a tonic effect on the cast.

The fundamental problems remain, however. I must admit that I have never felt at home with the whole concept of the "big", grandiose, semi-operatic musical. Let's make an opera, let's make a musical, don't let's make an overblown hybrid. Still, the genre has its successes, and Martin Guerre isn't one of them. The plot doesn't grip; the score, adequate enough as background music, fails to provide any memorable balance.

The high points, in fact, are still the same as they were when the show opened - Bob Avian's foot-stamping choreography, Iain Glen's virile performance as the hero. For the rest, the 16th-century costumes look good, Juliette Caton is a sweet-voiced heroine, two-and-a-half hours pass not disagreeably. And there let us leave it, since I doubt whether any amount of revision could succeed in making a silk purse out of the original material.